


Terminated

by onesickmind



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-14
Updated: 2014-09-14
Packaged: 2018-02-17 09:40:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2305145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onesickmind/pseuds/onesickmind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I got fired today. So Kevin did, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Terminated

Kevin came to in the garbage dumpster behind Strexcorp's main office. His hands were still bound together from his meeting with HR. He could feel bruises forming on his face.

It was always disorienting to wake up bound and beaten on a pile of garbage, or at least, as the only time this had ever happened to him, it was highly disorienting, and one time counted as all the times. Always. 100% of times. Even if just this once. All...

Kevin's head lolled. He could tell because the sun and the building ditched suddenly to the side. He tried to steady it, but found his neck had no strength. Dizziness threatened to black him out. He felt out of breath and panted shallowly while he tried to regain enough coherency to remember what had happened.

He started with his wounds. He was good at remembering where wounds came from. A few strikes to the face… that was standard, that came from the man who bound him and escorted him to HR… it's inappropriate to see HR without being a little roughed up…

He tugged at his ropes. Oh. Ow. His wrists were much more sore than they usually wound up after the token struggle. It was like he had pulled and twisted with all his might. The bone felt bruised. He swore he could feel dried blood.

Feel things. Felt things. He didn't feel the injuries that were normally associated with a visit to HR-- no corrective whip marks, no team-building burns, no puncture wounds from training. 

He twisted his wrists weakly and tried to remember the scene. Shouting, shaking, face wet. Crying? Why would he do that? He was always happy! So happy and proud to work for Strex! It was everything. But there was the memory, bruises forming on his wrists as he cried in terror-- no, despair-- no, abandonment-- no, betrayal-- no, worthlessness-- no, plummeting-- no, rage-- no, desperation-- no, no, no---

No. No. NO! NO!

He'd been fired.

"Kevin R. Free is terminated from Strexcorp."

He read it, resting upside-down on the desk, before they had a chance to finish their vague mumbles about performance quality and lack of improvement. And his smile had frozen on his face while he took in several deep, rapid gasps of breath, for a moment beginning to enter a panic attack before his survival skills kicked in.

But there is no survival in the office of HR. While he fought and cried, told them they had made a mistake, demanded a reevaluation, they merely smiled their blank smiles and said there was no discussion. Then they shot him in the chest.

Oh.

Kevin shifted, and the fortunate position he had fallen into opened up. Pressure was taken off of his chest. He was bleeding out.

Kevin curled back into the position he had been in, the structures of his torso twisting to close the wound. Now he could feel the stickiness, wet and soaking through his clothes, and the wound itself, excruciating, deep, and beginning to pour out fresh quantities of hot blood.

He remembered the thud in his chest, followed by pain. He remembered struggling to stand, falling against assistant managers who began to drag him from the room, trying to support himself on them while fighting to free himself from their grasp, shouting, begging, to remove the bullet, to remove the termination, to give him another chance…

Things going black as HR said, "We cannot discuss this."

Kevin keened and began to weep. He was discarded here, meant to be already dead. His arm tingled and ached, not from any injury but from the pure heartbreak of being thrown away. He loved Strex. Strex did not feel so strongly.

He almost gave up right there, accepting with despair that his value in this world had dropped to nothing. But some deep survival instinct, left over from the days Desert Bluffs was feral and free, told him to curl hard around the wound and fight his bonds.

With concentration, the knots really weren't too hard to unravel. Employees were expected to accept their restraints, so nobody had bothered to make them truly secure. But he wasn't an employee anymore, was he? As he pulled his wrists free, that thought felt thrilling and liberating at first, like he was flying, but then his stomach plummeted, like he had looked down and seen the reality of how far the hard ground was. He cowered and despaired at the fact freedom was equivalent to having lost everything worth being bound to. 

Freedom also meant he would very, very likely die soon. Even if the bleeding stopped, he was worthless. Strex had terminated him. No one would want him. He would not find another job. He had nothing to offer in exchange for sustenance. He would drift like a ghost, starving, and perish in some abandoned nook.

But his caged and abused remnant from the old Desert Bluffs growled, _survive._

He carefully brought his hands around to his chest and pressed as hard as he could, which wasn't very hard. He was already weak. Dizzy. His lips felt fuzzy and everything but the hot slice through his muscle was numb. He sobbed a couple more times, heard footsteps, and froze.

Daniel's face appeared, just over the edge of the dumpster. 

"Oh. You're still alive," he said, looking at Kevin's wide eyes straining to see him.

Everything Daniel said sounded emotionless, even behind the sculpted smile. Kevin supposed he was programmed to sound cheerful, but the emotion was so monotonous that after working under him for months, it just became a default impassiveness. 

Fresh tears burned Kevin's eyes. Humiliation? Anger? Blame? Desperation? Fury? Disgust?

"Please," he said. The words scratched out of his dry mouth. He wasn't sure at first what he was begging for, or why he was begging someone who so clearly had failed to use his position to stop this from happening in the first place. Someone who must be his enemy now, looking down at him. Approving of his status as trash. 

"Please." He squeezed his eyes shut, gritted his teeth, and tried to figure out what could possibly save him. "Please tell them this was a mistake."

"I tried to save you," Daniel said.

Kevin looked at him again, in disbelief. 

"I gave you orders. I thought if you followed them, you would be protected. I tried to increase your value. And you obeyed very well. You exceeded my expectations. However, it was not enough for Strex. You, personally, are simply unacceptable. So when you made your next mistake, I told them. And they had to terminate you."

"But it was such a small mistake."

"It wouldn't have mattered if you had been important to the company."

"You said you were on my side."

"I also am on the side of Strex. And you failed to be an asset to us."

"Why… why are you even here? Didn't you come out to help me?"

Daniel paused. "I had not been involved in terminating an employee before. I had the power to give the final word. I wanted to see how it felt to have that sort of control. I thought your body would make me feel things."

"How does it feel?"

"It doesn't feel like anything."

"You got me terminated… and you feel nothing?"

Kevin had caught Daniel's gaze, and he looked away. "That is right. It was just part of my job. Soon I'll forget this incident, and you, completely."

"Please. You have to save me. Tell them I have value. You worked with me. You saw how hard I tried. You told me I was doing well. You reassured me I didn't have do more. You guided me, I trusted you. Please, convince them there was some sort of mix-up!"

"I can't discuss this."

"At least help me stop the bleeding."

Daniel looked at him in silence. Then he walked away.

Tears came more heavily, with the fresh feeling of rejection and abandonment. The affirmation nobody wanted him, nobody even cared to show a scrap of humanity towards him, made him feel annihilated. He lay there bleeding, broken, useless, incomplete.

Kevin's hand began to tremble from fatigue. He almost let it drop away. In that moment, he could just relax, close his eyes, let his hands fall away from the wound, and bleed out. Like he was supposed to. Like Strex decided he must do. Daniel would come back in a few hours and find Kevin transformed into the corpse he had been expecting. He'd empty the office wastebaskets on top of his spent body. 

He tried it, just a little. Closed his eyes. Felt the warm tears squeeze out between the lids and trickle, soothing, down his face. Relaxed his neck and shoulders and body. But not his hand… well… maybe just for a moment…


End file.
